At the Bar; From Hoboken to Hollywood: A 1960's Idealist Finds a Home in 1990's Television.

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A little more than a year ago, Roger Lowenstein was sitting in his law office in Hoboken, blearily looking out at the Clam Broth House next door. It was 10 o'clock at night. He still had not eaten dinner. Everyone else had long since gone home and he still had loads of work to do. His marriage had disintegrated, in part because of the demands of his work. As courts grew clogged and the practice more complicated, his law work had turned from trying cases to pushing paper. Moreover, his partners grew increasingly rebellious, his clients unappreciative, and, it seemed to him, the profession more cynical.

In short, Mr. Lowenstein was experiencing yet another existential crisis in his 47-year-old lawyerly life, one that came to an end only when a friend, a Hollywood type, called to entice him out with tales of the good life.

One day, the story goes, Sherwood Anderson grew so fed up with making paint in Elyria that he packed his bags and began walking to Chicago, where he wrote "Winesburg, Ohio."

Similarly, with that phone call Mr. Lowenstein decided to suspend his practice and follow his muse to Los Angeles, where, through a series of flukes, he became a writer for the television series "L.A. Law."

Alas, Mr. Lowenstein's tenure was brief; after a mere 15 weeks, he and two other newly recruited lawyer-writers were axed. Recession has reached McKenzie Brackman as much as it has real law firms. But Mr. Lowenstein remains so enthralled by the experience that what was supposed to be a sabbatical from the law has become permanent exile.

The course of a career like Mr. Lowenstein's is a blueprint for a whole generation of lawyers. They went to college (in his case, the University of Michigan) and law school (Harvard) during the New Frontier and the Great Society. Infused with idealism, they took low-paying but psychically rewarding jobs in the public sector. (Mr. Lowenstein was New Jersey's first Federal public defender). A few years, children and mortgages later, these lawyers entered more mainstream, remunerative forms of practice.

Cut to that fateful night in June 1990, with Mr. Lowenstein, by now a miserable $200,000-a-year lawyer, peering out his office window. By September, he was on his way to California, half titillated, half terrified. As things turned out, he took to Tinseltown like Gauguin to Tahiti.

His first gig was as a $300-a-week technical adviser to the A.B.C. program "Equal Justice." Soon he was writing scripts for two other shows, "Law and Order" and "The Human Factor." Then, in the spring of 1991, he was one of three real-life lawyers hired to help write episodes of "L.A. Law," a show lawyers either love or love picking apart.

Mr. Lowenstein soon found himself at 20th Century Fox, toiling in the very cubbyholes where Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Pearl S. Buck once worked. He spent his days brainstorming with other writers, hobnobbing with Richard Dysart and other stars of the show, and fielding phone calls from envious lawyers.

In fact, his lawyer friends were far more impressed, he ventured, than if he had he been named to the United States Supreme Court. Some called begging for guest appearances. Once, his father called to complain about the status of Leland McKenzie, the fictitious firm's erstwhile pillar of rectitude, who had taken up with Rosalind Shays, the dragon lady running the place.

"I told him, look, the guy's been a stiff for five years; give him a break, give him a little sex," Mr. Lowenstein recalled. He reports that his father is now a happy man; Shays subsequently fell down an elevator shaft and Mr. Dysart, who portrays MacKenzie, sent him an autographed glossy.

But in August, the bubble burst. With production falling perilously behind schedule, the show cashiered its three lawyer-writers and brought in a senior producer. "I was stunned," Mr. Lowenstein recalled. "I felt like Mike Tyson had just punched me in the stomach." Now, he is back to writing scripts as a free-lancer.

Mr. Lowenstein left behind a pile of plots. Never, now, will Arnie Becker, the show's waspish lawyer, appear before a rabbinical court, or Bennie, its retarded messenger, visit the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library to learn more about Watergate. But far from feeling bitter, Mr. Lowenstein, who says he has earned $80,000 over the last 12 months, feels reborn, partly because he believes he is reaching more people now than he ever did in practice.

"Roger Lowenstein in 1968 would have poo-pooed writing for television because, unlike the law, it wasn't an adequate vehicle for making the world a better place," he said. "But given the growing cynicicm of lawyers and judges, I was simply wrong. Besides, this is fun -- and most lawyers don't have enough fun."

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 1991, on Page B00020 of the National edition with the headline: At the Bar; From Hoboken to Hollywood: A 1960's Idealist Finds a Home in 1990's Television. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe